Kathryn mcgreens班的三年级学生独立阅读和与朋友一起阅读，他们一起练习流利性和理解能力.

By Laura Onstot '03 | Photos by Mike Siegel

Kathryn McGreenery M.Ed. 在华盛顿州埃德蒙兹的大学广场小学，11岁的她每天和24名三年级学生在一起.

Each year, 越来越多的学生来到她的教室，他们的阅读水平低于三年级的标准, including an increasing number of students who don’t speak English at home. “I have to differentiate the full range of students, 他们中的一些人达到了五年级的阅读水平，一些人正在学习字母的名字和发音,” she says.

尽管她的本科教育给了她在大多数领域教学所需的工具, she says she was struggling to teach literacy skills to a  wide range of readers.

“Everybody knows that vocabulary is important,” says Bill Nagy, a Seattle Pacific University professor of education who specializes in literacy, “they often just don’t know how to teach it.” Nagy didn’t plan a career turning teachers into masters of literacy. 语言本身是他在70年代的主要兴趣他完成了语言学博士学位, a few years later, 在伊利诺伊大学的阅读研究中心找到了一个研究职位. 在那里，他发现一些学者正在努力确定帮助孩子学习阅读的最佳方法.

“It was a time of great ferment,” Nagy says now. “How to teach reading has been a hotly debated issue for the last 30 or 40 years.”

Kathryn mc绿叶老师与一小群需要阅读理解技能额外支持的学生一起工作, such as identifying main ideas and supporting details in a text.

纳吉希望超越意识形态的争论，转而仔细研究教学方法——这不是一件容易的事. “教一教室的孩子比把火箭送上月球要复杂得多, as far as I’m concerned,” he says.

At SPU since 1996, 纳吉专注于两件事:通过SPU的识字教育硕士课程在课堂上帮助老师，并为博士生提供建议, the next generation of literacy researchers. For his literacy work, Nagy was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame in 2009.

A lot of teachers face McGreenery’s struggle, he says, 发现自己没有能力教来自非英语家庭或有学习障碍的孩子阅读.

纳吉说:“网易彩票app的教育系统没有为最脆弱的儿童提供服务. “I’ve come, increasingly, to see my work as addressing that.”

The Power of Words

在西雅图州立大学攻读文学硕士学位期间，麦克格林尼说她学会了重新思考
the role of individual words in learning to read. McGreenery says she always knew vocabulary
“很重要，”但我没有看到词汇(或缺乏词汇)有多么令人难以置信的影响力。
was and how huge of a task it was to teach!”

For years, teachers have been having students memorize words and definitions, a method Nagy describes as “worse than a waste of time.”

“教室里的很多词汇活动只是让已经认识单词的孩子炫耀的机会，让不认识单词的孩子感到羞辱,” Nagy explains.

纳吉说，教师需要支持孩子们，这样他们才能学会有意义地使用单词. As an example, 纳吉说，最好把学习使用词汇想象成学习使用工具. The best way to master it is to do it.

Think of the word “confine,” Nagy says. Rather than having students parrot a memorized definition, he suggests the teacher ask students about things they might want to confine.

Nagy imagines a student named Johnny who replies, “My pet tarantula.”

“Why?” asks Nagy’s hypothetical teacher. “Because it might bite my little sister,” responds the student.

约翰尼现在不仅开始掌握“限制”这个词，而且他明白“限制”这个概念有能力保护他的小妹妹.

麦克格林格林说，她在斯坦福大学学习期间不仅学会了教授词汇以提高读写能力的技巧, 但她对纳吉和其他教职员工对研究的严谨投入表示赞赏.

“我学到的一件事是，我的教学需要关注基于研究的方法，而不是未经证实的趋势,” she says.

Better Teachers Through Research

Nicole Swedberg M.Ed. ’95, Ed.D. ’04, 当了多年的一年级老师后，她开始注意到学生的语言发展和读写能力之间的联系. “I wanted to know more about this connection,” she says.

Swedberg started graduate work at another university, but transferred to SPU largely due to several conversations she’d had with Nagy. He had a different way of thinking, she says. “His perspective, although broad, tends to focus on the features of language itself, and how these features interact with strategies.”

Swedberg now works in a private practice helping struggling readers and writers, many of whom are dyslexic. 她在网易彩票下载的工作中几乎经常用到的一个方面是纳吉所说的给学生“一种任务感”.”

She gets them to use words by writing text for pictures, using a book with images of frogs flying around a small town at night. “It’s a story that just wants to be told, and my students jump right into the telling,” Swedberg explains. “Everyone calls [Nagy] a rock star,” says Kristine Gritter, SPU assistant professor of curriculum and instruction. “He’s not just a scholar, he’s a top scholar.”

Literacy expert and Professor of Education Bill Nagy in his office at SPU.

As a middle school language arts teacher in Florida, 格里特发现自己很沮丧，因为缺乏针对教师的继续教育，这些教师专注于提高他们教授阅读等基本技能的能力. 她的一些学生仍然在努力阅读，她不知道如何帮助. “I didn’t know a lot about reading, I knew a lot about literature,” she says. 现在，格里特培训教师帮助那些在早期教育中遇到困难的读者. “Many secondary English teachers are not aware that adolescents struggle with reading, what their struggles are, and how to deliver instruction that remediates some of the struggle,” she explains.

While Nagy focuses on developing reading skills, Scott Beers, 扫盲计划教育硕士主席兼课程与教学副教授, 是否一直在培训教师，让他们在学生落后太多、无法迎头赶上之前，利用评估来及早识别出学习困难的学生.”

比尔斯和纳吉还与华盛顿大学(University of Washington)的书面语言特殊学习障碍定义和治疗中心(Center for Defining and treatment Specific Learning disability in Written Language)合作，获得了一笔刚刚获得的联邦拨款. The team, which includes education experts and neuroscientists, 是否会识别和帮助那些有学习障碍的学生，从而阻碍他们的写作能力. “我相信网易彩票app会做一些工作，大大提高教师的能力 help students,” Nagy says.

西雅图州立大学的扫盲教师还有教育学助理教授豪尔赫·普雷西亚多(Jorge Preciado), who researches ways to improve literacy teaching for students learning English, like those coming into McGreenery’s classes.

Literacy is essential to success in school and careers, Nagy和他的同事们决心确保像mcgreene和Swedberg这样的老师能够让他们的学生写作和阅读, no matter where they come from, what language they speak, or what learning challenges they might face.

A great book can get kids reading. Kristine Gritter, SPU assistant professor of curriculum and instruction, offers her recommendations of what may inspire yours.

Laura Onstot 03住在西雅图，写的东西从这个城市最好的甜甜圈到国家政治. Her work has appeared in Seattle Weekly, The Seattle Times, High Country News, MSN, AOL, The Rumpus, and Agence France Presse. 不在键盘前时，她会骑自行车、徒步旅行、在太平洋西北部航行.